Page 1418 - Week 05 - Thursday, 13 May 2021
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urban forest throughout the city reflect the careful attention of Canberra’s leaders to aesthetic design and respect for the natural environment.
Just over 100 years after the city’s conception, and with a population far exceeding its original design, careful planning continues to be essential to ensure the city’s liveability and the integrity of the vision for the next 100 years. We need to think carefully about how we maintain all we love about our city nestled in its landscape and do not oversee a never-ending urban sprawl that destroys habitat and undermines our irreplaceable natural assets.
The ACT government recognises that it has a key role in protecting, conserving and enhancing the region’s natural environment and the ecosystem services provided by nature, while also supporting and sustaining the needs of a growing city and community.
The ACT protects more of its natural assets than any other jurisdiction in Australia. More than 70 per cent of the territory’s 236,000 hectares is conserved in parks and nature reserves. This far exceeds the aim of the global Convention on Biological Diversity Aichi biodiversity target of at least 17 per cent of terrestrial and inland waters being conserved in protected areas.
Urban Canberra provides an additional 6,600 hectares of publicly accessible open space, including urban parks, sportsgrounds and semi-natural urban open space for the community. These areas are vital to ensuring that the natural, cultural and recreational values are conserved, managed and enhanced for all to benefit now and into the future.
As our city continues to grow, we need to increase our focus on the conservation of the natural environment to build our collective resilience, as we face the ongoing threats of introduced plants and animals, and the effects of a changing climate such as more extreme weather events and, as we have recently seen, the very real risk of global pandemics.
The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed to the world the profound interconnections between the health of humans, animals and ecosystems. The degradation of nature, through the loss and fragmentation of habitats, and industrial-scale resource extractions, have been clearly linked to pandemics, with all of their consequences. COVID-19 is just the latest and most widespread of these zoonotic pandemics caused by our impact on nature. Climate change and biodiversity loss will likely exacerbate the threat of future pandemics.
Recognising this relationship, world leaders and major institutions are calling for a nature-centred economic recovery to avoid future pandemics. The ACT is poised to be a global leader on this issue. Every day, we demonstrate the diversity of benefits for the community and for urban liveability of integrating nature into our urban design and ongoing city planning.
Our streets, parks and walkways, and the reserves within and surrounding the city, provide each of the city’s more than 450,000 residents with access to nature within one kilometre of their home. These natural and semi-natural open spaces provide
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